Jesse's World: Rev. Jackson's Dubious Legacy

And: 9/11 & The Epstein Files; What Does The US Right Want From Europe?

This clip from an old Saturday Night Live is how I choose to remember the Rev. Jesse Jackson at my most charitable. He was a terrific public speaker — maybe the last great orator in American public life — and had enough of a sense of humor to make fun of himself by appearing on SNL to mark the passing of Dr. Seuss by reciting “Green Eggs And Ham” in his trademark style. It’s great!

But mostly, I have unflattering memories of the pastor and civil rights activist, who died this week in Chicago at 84. This, mostly based on reporting I did in 2001.

It’s hard to explain to younger people what a force Jesse Jackson once was in American politics. He rose to national prominence as part of Martin Luther King’s entourage, and was present at King’s assassination. For days after that 1968 killing, young Jackson sported the turtleneck he wore that night, stained with King’s blood. For years, Jackson associates and political enemies, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, accused Jackson of intentionally smearing the slain civil rights leader’s blood on his garment, in a self-anointing as King’s successor. Jackson repeatedly denied the charge.

He ran for the presidency twice in the 1980s, and established himself as a Democratic Party power broker in the 1990s and early 2000s. But his most durable legacy is as an avatar of racial identity politics, which, with brilliant cunning, he brought from the streets to corporate boardrooms and university administrations. We are still dealing with this illiberal cancer today, which has broken containment on the left, and has now been embraced by young white activists of the right.

Much will be said in the days to come of Jackson’s role in the post- King civil rights movement, particularly his trailblazing campaigns for the White House. Though one is reluctant to speak ill of the dead so soon after their passing, the Chicago operator’s racializing of American politics for the profit of himself and his allies, must not go unnoticed. There is a straight line between the kind of lucrative racial activism Jackson pioneered, and the same profiteering practiced at a far grander scale by the founders of Black Lives Matter.

Jackson’s chief organizational base was Rainbow/PUSH, formed in 1996 by the merger of his two activist groups, Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition. In early 1997, Rainbow/PUSH founded the Wall Street Project, a non-profit initiative designed to promote “inclusion” of racial minorities in leading financial firms, and to fight “economic apartheid” in the elite financial sector. Jackson was a particularly important channel for Wall Street elites to the Clinton White House. Jackson started another non-profit group, the Citizenship Education Fund, closely aligned with Rainbow/PUSH; CEF generally handled Wall Street Project contributions.

Around this time, Jackson separately brokered a deal with Anheuser-Busch, the giant brewery, which he had targeted in the early 1980s in a high-profile boycott campaign to shame it as racist, to sell one of its lucrative Chicago distribution franchises to a group of investors led by his sons Yusuf and Jonathan. The Jackson family withstood criticism (a Chicago Tribune columnist mocked the reverend as the “King of Beers”), and the franchise brought in tens of millions in annual revenue until Yusuf Jackson sold it in 2013.

The Anheuser-Busch deal was a classic Jesse Jackson operation. His method was to accuse a business of racism, and then, after bad press and further consultations, announce that the target had agreed to Jackson’s demands. With this usually came a generous donation to Rainbow/PUSH.

The real money poured in when Jackson applied this strategy systematically, to top investment banks and financial brokerages. Jackson’s Wall Street Project was embraced by financial industry titans, including Sanford Weill, then the chairman of Citigroup, and Arthur Levitt Jr., who at the time was Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Wall Street Project kicked off in 1998 by asking financial firms for a $50,000 contribution to support its lobbying efforts, landing $500,000 in donations from big banks for its coming-out. Also that year, the federal housing lender Freddie Mac contributed $1 million to Rainbow/PUSH, earmarking at least some of it for Wall Street Project purposes.

Jackson struck gold on Wall Street, and by tapping the US business community more broadly. Millions began pouring into Rainbow/PUSH enterprises. In 2001, the New Yorker reported that in the previous year, the organizations operating under the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition umbrella brought in $17 million, noting that “almost all of it came from American business.”

A key Jackson role was to leverage his Clinton administration connections and civil rights reputation on behalf of corporations seeking federal approval for mergers. For example, despite the opposition of lesser-known civil rights organizations, Jackson backed the 1998 merger of two banks, Citibank and Travelers, after which Citicorp sent $50,000 to the Citizenship Education Fund; Travelers followed up with a $100,000 gift.

On behalf of Rainbow/PUSH, Jackson came out against the proposed $91 billion merger of telecommunications giants SBC and Ameritech, calling it “anti-democratic.” Jackson had particular pull at the time with the Federal Communications Commission, whose approval was necessary for the merger to go through. Its then-chairman, Clinton appointee William Kennard, was the first black man to head the FCC, and was a close friend of Jackson’s, once publicly calling Jackson his “hero.”

A year later, the civil rights leader was on the opposite side of the SBC-Ameritech deal, which sailed through FCC approval. Rainbow/PUSH emerged $500,000 richer from donations from the two companies. Jackson also brought into the deal investment firm Georgetown Partners, which had never done telecom deals, but which was owned by Chester Davenport, a key Jackson ally.

A year later, when GTE and Bell Atlantic were in talks to merge as Verizon, Jackson endorsed the deal. Lo, the Citizenship Education Fund received a combined $1 million from the companies, with Verizon agreeing to a further $300,000 contribution to fund Rainbow/PUSH conventions through 2002.

It didn’t always work. In 2001, Jackson tried his shakedown on Silicon Valley firms, T.J. Rodgers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, refused to play ball. “We can now officially describe Cypress Semiconductor as a white supremacist hate group,” Jackson declaimed. For his part, Rodgers denounced Jackson in my New York Post column for “running a scam for his own benefit.”

That same year, personal scandal put Jackson’s activist profiteering in jeopardy. On the eve of the annual Wall Street Project meeting in New York, the National Enquirer reported that Jackson had a love child with Karin Stanford, a Rainbow/PUSH staffer. The man seen at the time as the leader of black America acknowledged the child’s existence, and carried on with that year’s Wall Street event, which brought in $2.1 million.

It was difficult at the time to find out how much money Jackson really made from his non-profits. As a New York Post columnist, I examined the tax filings of CEF, which were publicly available by law. I found that the tax-exempt CEF nearly quintupled its revenue in a single year, increasing its charitable harvest from $2 million in 1998 to $9.7 million in 1999. But the tax forms were a total mess.

For example, CEF claimed on its federal tax forms to have received donations from firms that say they did not donate. Spokespersons for Compaq, the computer company, and Coors Brewing told me that they had indeed given to one of Jackson’s organizations, but not the ones CEF listed.

It might sound like small potatoes, but back then, when I asked Cleta Mitchell, a Washington lawyer who specialized in nonprofit tax law, to take a look at the CEF filings, she said, “There are red flags all over this.”

“You can’t help but be struck by the fact that, reading those tax returns, there’s a lot of money being spent in ways that aren’t clear,” said Mitchell at the time.

Of course it didn’t matter. As Washington sources told me back then, the IRS doesn’t like going after religious organizations, and certainly would not relish auditing ones headed by the nation’s top black leader. Corporations didn’t seem to mind either. The Wall Street Project is still around, though Jackson’s withdrawal from the public square a decade ago amid health problems diminished its visibility.

In a sense, Jackson never fully recovered from his love child scandal. With Democrats out of the White House through most of the 2000s, he had much less influence. The next Democrat to take the presidency was Barack Obama, who, as the first black president, de facto diminished Jackson’s unique role in political life.

Then again, it could be argued that in the Obama era and beyond there was no need for Jesse Jackson, because his worldview – one based on leveraging identity politics for political and corporate power – had broadly triumphed in elite culture, and trickled down.

In 1987, Jackson led a student protest at Stanford University, demanding an end to its mandatory “Western Culture” humanities course. “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” protesters chanted. The students won. In the next academic year, Stanford introduced a multicultural replacement, including non-Western perspectives and those from women and people of color.

That protest, and Jackson’s role in nationalizing its anti-Western goals, drew considerable comment at the time. Within thirty years, though, what was then seen as a radical demand had become the establishment position within all academia, and remains so today.

Similarly, the ideological impetus behind the Wall Street Project eventually encompassed all of corporate America. By 2015, major corporations were all-in on “diversity” hiring and education.

An aging Jackson was out-hustled, in both senses of the word, by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the founders of Black Lives Matter. In 2014, BLM launched itself as a formal non-profit entity in 2014, after the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. After the George Floyd killing in 2020, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) raised a staggering $90 million in donations from corporations and foundations, in a single year beggaring Jackson’s lifetime honeypot.

And, as with Jackson’s own entities, BLMGNF faced accusations of corruption and mismanagement of funds. Cullors’s brother, for example, took in $1.6 million for “security services,” and the organization bought a $6 million luxury southern California mansion as a “campus” for the organization and its leadership.

In October 2025, the Associated Press reported that the Trump Justice Department had begun a federal fraud investigation into BLMGNF – a dramatic turn of affairs that Jackson and his organizations never faced.

Though Jesse Jackson was only a shadow of his former activist self at the time of his passing, his significance should not be overlooked. Though the Great Awokening had many sources, the canny and entrepreneurial Rev. Jackson was its godfather. If you seek his monument, look to every corporate HR department, major media institution, university programming, and patterns of foundation grant-making over the last twenty years or so.

And, more darkly, look to the rise of identity politics in the younger generation of whites, who are not intimidated by Jackson-style moralizing. A growing number of them openly embrace pro-white racism, violating a taboo on which Jackson’s moral power depended. What was good, financially and politically, for Jesse Jackson, his allies, and his activist descendants may yet prove disastrous for American democracy.

Nevertheless, I hope he made his peace with God, and rests in the arms of the Father. RIP.

Epstein And 9/11

Well, would you look at this (taken from this tweet):

The Epstein Files leading up to 9/11 are not available. One wonders why. Notice that the DOJ is withholding half of its Epstein evidence. No wonder the popular podcaster, former Navy SEAL, and MAGA supporter Shawn Ryan has gone ballistic on the Trump administration, denouncing it in an F-bomb-laden tirade for covering up on Epstein.

You cannot promise transparency on Epstein, as Trump did, then withhold so much. Not if you want to maintain credibility.

What Kind Of Europe Does America Want?

I’ve unlocked Ross Douthat’s column today because his message is important, and deserves wider distribution. He writes about the troubled European-American relationship, and says that as a Europhile, he too would like to see a stronger, more civilizationally robust Europe. Therefore, he agrees with Marco Rubio’s recent Munich speech. On the other hand:

But American conservatives should also be clear about the tensions inherent in their appeal for European change. The obvious one divides Rubio from his boss: When the secretary of state says, “We Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” he’s pretending that we didn’t just have a pointless mini-crisis over Greenland in which the Trumpian ask wasn’t “direct and urgent” so much as immoral and destructive, less a demand for healthy change than an abusive demand for submission.

A more general tension is that American conservatives tend to downplay how much of the European transformation — the shift, over time, to weakness from power, to decadence from self-belief — was actively encouraged by American power brokers. As my colleague Christopher Caldwell put it in December, if Europe today seems “vitiated” and “enfeebled,” this destiny was imposed and not just chosen: “It was at America’s urging that they undertook this work of self-destruction in the first place.”

In his Munich speech, Rubio told a story about the post-World War II moment in which the trans-Atlantic alliance saved Europe from both Communist victory and postimperial decay. But the reality is much more complex. From Franklin Roosevelt pressuring Winston Churchill to weaken the British Empire to Dwight Eisenhower treating France and Britain coldly in the Suez crisis, American policy often encouraged Europe’s retreat from global power. And the same pattern continued, in varying ways, through the post-Cold War era and the war on terrorism, when Bush-era conservatives imagined that they could run a global imperium more efficiently if they ignored or overruled Old Europe.

In effect, then, today’s American conservatives are suggesting that past American elites were often wrong and that Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, and for that matter, Jacques Chirac, were often right. (Indeed, JD Vance said that explicitly last year.) Even if that new advice is good counsel, it still can feel like a betrayal given the radically different demands that came before.

And:

“We do not want our allies to be weak,” Rubio said in Munich. For the trans-Atlantic relationship to change in the way that he desires, that promise needs to be proved out. Because from the Eisenhower era to the age of Trump, we have often given Europeans good reason to think otherwise.

This is true, and it’s something we Europhilic American conservatives need to understand.

That said, it is hard to overstate how bizarre things are on this side of the pond, with regard to civilizational self-destruction. A Reform UK supporter tweeted this from the British government’s guide to guarding against terrorism:

If you are a Briton who notices and objects to your own replacement, then you might be a terrorist. It’s surreal. But this is where Britain and Europe are. Well, Western Europe; here in Central Europe, people see things more rationally. In a number of statements, but public and private, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban has said that Western Europe’s choice for mass migration has been self-destructive and likely irreversible. And he has said that Hungary refuses to participate in suicide via sentimental humanitarianism. This seems to be the general view in Central European nations, though it has not been articulated as well or as forcefully as by the Hungarian leader.

The British government’s guidelines would place Orban (and the majority of voters in the EU’s eastern flank) in the category of potential terrorist. Let that sink in. Hell, even Monty Python’s John Cleese claims “terrorist” status under this principle, and says “I’m afraid they’re going to have to arrest me.”

Meanwhile, Hamit Coskun, a secular, left-wing Turk who was acquitted in the UK on criminal charges connected to his publicly burning a copy of the Koran, says he might be forced to seek political asylum in the US:

As I told Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, what I did constituted political protest and the law, as I understood it, was on my side. Crown Prosecution Service guidance makes clear that legitimate protest can be offensive and at times must be, if it is to be effective. In that spirit, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects not just polite speech but speech that offends, shocks or disturbs. Political expression, above all, is meant to enjoy the strongest protection.

Alas, the judge ruled otherwise. And the reasoning used to convict me raises troubling questions, not only about the scope of public order law but about whether Britain is witnessing the quiet return of blasphemy laws. If that conviction is upheld tomorrow, I hope the Trump Administration will take me in as a victim of political persecution.

Although the man who assaulted me was prosecuted separately, he was spared jail despite shouting “I’m going to kill you” as he attacked me with a knife. The Crown Prosecution Service says his actions helped to prove my guilt. It is arguing that because I was attacked, my behaviour cannot have been peaceful. Under this logic, my guilt is proven by how offended or aggressive someone else chose to be in response.

Yet the UK government has appealed Coskin’s acquittal. More:

If the High Court decides I am guilty after all, Britain will have failed me and I will apply for asylum in the United States. I hope America still stands with those who believe in peaceful protest.

This is no longer just about me. It is about whether the West still believes that no religion is beyond criticism, especially when it shapes public life and political power. That was the principle I was imprisoned for defending in Turkey and it was the principle I was defending outside the Turkish consulate. I have no intention of abandoning that fight.

I would not burn a Koran. Even though I do not believe Islam is true, I feel that respect for the religion of others is an important principle to live by, within reason. But I also believe that peaceful protest, like Coskin’s, however offensive, must be defended in a liberal democracy. If he is ultimately convicted of blasphemy, I hope the Trump administration will grant him political asylum.

Political asylum, to a man forced to flee from (checks notes) Great Britain. That’s where Europe is today. This is the fault of Labour and the Tories — indeed, of the entire UK ruling class. Remember what that American student at Oxford told me a year ago: “If the ruling class actually hated the people of this country, I don’t know what they would be doing any differently.”

God only knows what is going to happen to that country of my ancestors. Though my surname is German, DNA testing shows that I’m 94 percent English and Irish. My English ancestors, according to DNA, came mostly from London and Lancashire. Somebody on X yesterday said that for many of us Americans, Britain is like “our Israel,” so we have special concern for its fate. Aye.